IBM Cloud Pak for Data v4.x Solution Architect Advanced Practice Exam: Hard Questions 2025

A regulated enterprise is designing IBM Cloud Pak for Data (CP4D) on OpenShift for multiple lines of business. They require strict workload isolation, separate network policies, independent upgrade windows, and the ability to delegate administration to different platform teams while still sharing the same physical OpenShift cluster. Which architecture best meets these requirements with the fewest security and operational compromises?

A CP4D deployment must meet a strict RPO/RTO for metadata-driven services (e.g., governance artifacts and platform metadata). The customer proposes backing up only OpenShift etcd and persistent volumes. During a disaster recovery test, services restore but metadata catalog content is inconsistent and some assets are missing. What is the most likely architectural gap?

A customer will host both highly interactive notebook workloads and long-running batch AI training jobs on CP4D. They want to avoid resource starvation and ensure critical platform services remain stable during spikes. Which design best addresses this at the OpenShift/CP4D architecture level?

During a CP4D installation, the platform operator reports success, but multiple services remain in a degraded state. Investigation shows pods are repeatedly failing liveness probes due to inability to reach required internal endpoints via cluster DNS. The OpenShift cluster uses a custom DNS configuration and recently changed the cluster domain. What is the most appropriate next step to validate and remediate the issue?

A CP4D environment integrates with an enterprise LDAP/IdP for authentication. After enabling group-based access control, some users intermittently lose access to projects and services. Audit logs show successful authentication but authorization failures, especially after group membership changes. What is the most likely root cause and best corrective action?

A customer wants CP4D to access data in multiple private databases across different network zones. Security requires that the OpenShift cluster cannot initiate direct network connections into those zones; instead, traffic must traverse a controlled proxy/broker and be auditable. Which integration approach best satisfies the requirement while maintaining CP4D usability for data access?

A data virtualization (DV) workload is federating queries across a high-latency source and a local warehouse. Users complain that performance is unpredictable: some queries are fast, others time out. Query plans show large intermediate result sets being pulled from the remote source. Which change most directly improves performance predictability while preserving DV’s federated access model?

A DV administrator creates virtual tables over several sources, and governance requires that sensitive columns be masked for most users while allowing a restricted group to see raw values. The team implemented masking in the source databases, but DV queries still reveal raw data for some users via alternate paths. What is the most robust approach to enforce consistent masking at the virtualization layer?

A CP4D environment uses governance to manage data assets. A team reports that lineage is incomplete: transformations performed in notebooks and pipelines are not reflected, while SQL-based ETL lineage appears. They want lineage coverage without forcing all work into a single tool. Which strategy best improves end-to-end lineage in this scenario?

A solution architect must deploy an AI use case where training occurs on sensitive data and the resulting model must be promoted across environments (dev → test → prod) with auditability, reproducibility, and rollback. The organization also requires that only approved models can be deployed for scoring. Which approach best meets these requirements on CP4D?